Independent Institute Senior Fellow Robert Higgs is interviewed by Scott Horton of Antiwar Radio on the widening gap between public and private sector pay, the increasing affluence of military towns compared with others, the disappearance of traditional checks on government power, and the predation and incremental ratchet effect of expanding governmental powers that increase temporarily during wartime but never really recede.

In June 2008 the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a landmark ruling on the Second Amendment individual right to keep and bear arms with its Heller v. District of Columbia decision. Two years later, in June 2010, a second historic decision squeezed through the highest court in the land.

Senior Fellow Robert Higgs is interviewed here by Scott Horton on Antiwar.com Radio, warning those who long for total governmental and economic collapse to be careful what they wish for. Higgs also explains why federal spending cannot continue at the current record levels without a failure of the bond market. He further compares the military and economic over-extension of the Soviet Union prior to its collapse to the United States as a warning against rampant spending by the government.

With the hearings on the nomination of Elena Kagan to the U.S. Supreme Court, Research Fellow William J. Watkins, Jr., was interviewed on NPRs Talk of the Nation to discuss how to revise the nomination and selection process of Supreme Court Justices, based on his recent article in the Washington Examiner, A role for the people in judicial selection.

Independent Institute Senior Fellow Robert Higgs debates James Galbraith (Professor of Economics, University of Texas; son of infamous, liberal, Keynesian economist John Kenneth Galbraith) on Antiwar Radio regarding the folly of government bailouts for insolvent banks, creation of the Glass-Steagall Act as a means to prevent FDIC insured banks from taking excessive risks, benefits and detriments of public and private regulation and oversight, problems of regulatory capture and revolving door politics, divergent opinions on the causes of the Great Depression and efficacy of the New Deal and the arguments for and against government spending on public infrastructure.